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How to Enable Outlook Read Receipt Feature (& Disable)

To know if an email you sent is opened or not, you can enable the Outlook read receipt feature. Here’re the exact steps you should follow.

In email communication, it’s good to know if the email you sent is delivered and received by the recipient. This is especially useful in business and client-related email communications. For example, if you are sending an invoice to your client, knowing when the recipient opens the email will remove a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty. To get a notification when the email is opened, you have to manually enable the read receipt feature.

Thankfully, the Outlook Office application has a built-in option to enable or disable the read receipt feature. By selecting a checkbox, you can enable Outlook read receipt feature. You don’t have to use any third-party plugin or service.

In this quick and simple post, let me show how you can enable the read receipt feature in Outlook application.

Steps Enable Outlook Read Receipt Feature in Windows 10

You can enable the Read Receipt Outlook feature when sending a new email. Here’s how.

  1. Open the Outlook application. You can do that from the Start menu or by double-clicking on the desktop shortcut.
  2. Click the “New Email” option under the “Home” tab.
    Create-new-email-051020
  3. Once the Email Compose window opens, go to the “Options” tab.
  4. In the options, select the “Request a read receipt” checkbox.
    Enable-read-receipt-outlook-051020
  5. Now, send your email normally.

That is all. It is that simple to enable the read receipt feature in Outlook.

Restrictions & Issues

Do keep in mind that for the read receipt feature to work, the recipient should accept to send the read receipt. That is, the Outlook client will ask the recipient if they want to send a read receipt. If the recipient don’t want to send, they can reject the prompt. Rejecting a read receipt will not send you any kind of information. That is the reason why the option is called “Request read receipt”.

Also, depending on the email client used by the recipient, the read receipt feature might not work. For example, if the client is using the Thunderbird email client, they might not even see the read receipt prompt. Since there is no official standard in the email communications world, each provider and service implements its own way to send and receive read receipts. This causes compatibility issues when it comes to different email providers and clients.

Put simply, though the feature is baked into the official outlook application, there are a ton of issues that can break it. So, do keep that in mind while using the Outlook read receipt feature.

I hope that helps. If you are stuck or need some help, comment below and I will try to help as much as possible. If you like this article, check out how to run outlook in safe mode.

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